Gal Vihara at Polonnaruwa

The title for the next few posts is taken from the epilogue to Harry Williams’ autobiography, called Some Day I’ll Find You. In the epilogue, Williams is comparing his life and himself to Thomas Merton, and especially to Merton’s epiphany, shortly before his death, in front of the Buddhist statues in Polonnaruwa, where Merton writes of experiencing what he, Merton, sees in the faces of the giant figures:

The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation, but [that which] has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone of anything – without refutation – without establishing some other argument.

In his wonderful account Merton gives us a glimpse of glory:

The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no ‘mystery’. All problems are resolved and everything is clear simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, is charged with dharmakaya* – everything is emptiness and everything is compassion …. I have now seen and pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

Williams comments on this as the ideal, but that for him the reality is very different. He too has seen glimpses, but they leave him feeling increasingly out in the cold. And he quotes the old men in T.S. Eliot’s poem:

We returned to our places, those kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Williams is suggesting that glimpses of glory leave him somewhat apart, away from the mainstream, longing, and yet uncertain. He is reminded of a quote from the Spanish novelist and philosopher Unamuno: ‘God forbid you peace and give you glory’. Williams writes that his life seems to have been an answer to that prayer – not that he has attained the glory, but that he has caught glimpses of it now and then. He concludes with a small epiphany of his own:

Nothing is for nothing. You always have to pay for what you get. Without pain there can be no birth; without death no resurrection. In that necessity the ideal and the actual are reconciled and seem to belong inescapably to one another.

So, what is this glory? Whilst largely indefinable it’s often an experience of a different dimension of the ‘something that is more than ourselves’; the presence of God, and the magnificence and beauty of his presence in God’s creation …

*dharmakaya: the Sanskrit term for  “the cosmical body of the Buddha, the essence of all beings”